The Undivided Past (25 page)

Anyone who has persevered with this book thus far should be aware at least of this: the claim that the male and female identities established by biology and culture are more important than any other collective identities is at best highly tendentious. For it is merely one more example, alongside those made on behalf of
religion, nation, and
class, of the misleading but widespread practice of what has been termed “totalizing”: namely, the habit of describing and defining individuals by their membership in one single group, deemed to be more important and more all-encompassing than any other solidarity—and indeed than all others—to which they might simultaneously belong. As
Julia T. Wood rightly notes, “when we think of people primarily or exclusively as women or men,” then all other aspects of their humanity and their identity “except their sex are pushed into the background and virtually erased,” as “they are cast indiscriminately into two discrete categories that recognize only one aspect of human identity,” namely biology and gender. From the same perspective, the African American feminist
Bernice Reagon offers this powerful retort to
Germaine Greer, whose totalizing sentiment is one of this chapter’s epigraphs: “Every time you see a woman you’re looking at a human being who is like you in only one respect, but may be totally different from you in three or four others.”
⁶²

Indeed, it has generally been recognized since ancient
Greece that there has always been more to being human, and to human identity, than just being either a man or a woman. Although their views were in many ways very different,
Plato and
Aristotle both recognized that men and women possessed other identities than those determined by their sex and their gender. Plato’s ideal society was not primarily divided between men and women, but into three layers, largely on the basis of their public function: the producers (
economic), the auxiliaries (military), and the guardians (
political), and all of them supported by an underclass of
slaves.
⁶³
So when he expressed the hope that if suitably
educated, women might be able to fulfill whichever of these functions they were most fitted to undertake, as men already did, Plato was urging that distinctions between the sexes would (and should) become redundant and irrelevant. As for Aristotle: in addition to dividing humanity into the separate and unequal categories of male and female, he also sliced it into the separate and unequal categories of free and slave, which identities he regarded as fundamentally dissimilar, on the basis of differing social, economic, legal, and political circumstances. In short, both Plato and Aristotle recognized that the alternative ways in which Greek society was stratified and layered significantly undermined any single, simple homogenizing division of the population into men and women.
⁶⁴

As this suggests, the tendency to overstate the extent to which all men are alike (in contrast to women) and all women are alike (in contradistinction to men) also ignores the substantial variations that have always existed
within
each sex. For there have always been many different, simultaneous versions of
femininity, ways of presenting and representing oneself as a woman, and they are often defined against those of other women rather than against those of men (as, for instance, in the case of sexual orientation); by the same token, there have always been many different variants of masculinity and ways of presenting and representing oneself as a man, which are likewise often defined against those of other men rather than against those of women (as, again, in the case of sexual orientation).
⁶⁵
There are, in short, multiple femininities, as well as multiple masculinities, which means, as the historian
Alexandra Shepard observes, that we need to appreciate “the multifaceted nature of
gender identities,” which go substantially “beyond the binary opposition of men and women.… To discern the full complexities of the workings of gender in any society, we need to be as aware of the
gender differences
within
each sex as those
between
them.” We need to understand that despite the
Bible or Thomas
Paine or
John Gray, gender is not exclusively a male-female dichotomy.
⁶⁶

Such differences within each sex are well documented among the men and women of the
Middle Ages. In a classic essay, Eileen Power argued that all medieval women were “
Christian wives,” but she also admitted that they were divided by class and geography into feudal ladies, townswomen, or countrywomen, and were also differentiated in many other ways. For example, their marital status varied over time: some passed their entire lives as single women, some married so young that they spent their adult lives as wives, some lost husbands so early that their lives were mostly shaped by widowhood, and some passed slowly through all three stages.
Religious status also cut across many lines, not just in terms of Christian, Muslim, and
Jewish identities, but also because there were laywomen, professed nuns, pious mystics, true believers, or heretics.
Legal status incised deep divides too, differentiating free from serf, and serf from
slave; so did ethnicity, locality, and sexual orientation.
⁶⁷
The same was true regarding the varied gendered identities and plural masculinities of medieval men, and many of their distinctions revolve around the same axes as those of women, namely age, class, marital status, religion, legal status, ethnicity, locality, and sexual orientation. An elderly, peace-loving, celibate monk was a very different version of masculinity than a young, aggressive warrior who was also a sexual predator. All this made for a bewildering array of different forms of masculinity and femininity, a reality often in sharp contrast to single, divinely sanctioned polarity between the two sexes on which most medieval writers insisted.
⁶⁸

The same ambiguities hold in the early modern period, during which those distinct and
monolithic categories of men and women were repeatedly broken down, disarranged, overlain, and
undermined by the competing differentials of age, marital status, material resources, religious conviction, legal position, language, region, and sexual preference; and they were further complicated by differing modes of conduct and behavior, for there were many ways of fashioning and conducting oneself as an early modern man or woman. By the end of the eighteenth century, there were fewer nuns, mystics, and witches than at the beginning of the sixteenth, and there were more women teachers, writers, and governesses. There were also mistresses, harlots, and unmarried mothers, and there were pious evangelical women.
⁶⁹
In the same way, there were many different archetypes of early modern masculinity, ranging from youthful misrule to aged dependency. Some men expressed their maleness by being self-consciously strong, courageous, prudent, and reasonable, and by embracing appropriate religions and employment and wives; others did so by being self-indulgent, profligate, spendthrift, drunk, disorderly, even violent. The social practices of manhood and womanhood were thus “enormously diverse,” destabilizing the rigid male-female dichotomy by
means of a multiplicity of early modern
gender identities.
⁷⁰

By the nineteenth century, the alleged polarity between the sexes had been further broken down under the impact of urbanization and
industrialization. It was, for example, not the case that all men were for production while all women were for reproduction. Many
working-class men were frequently out of work during
economic downturns, or were only casual
laborers, or unfit to do a job owing to illness, injury, or old age. Most
middle-class men, whether in business or as professionals, did not produce anything, while many gentry and aristocrats did not work with their hands. By contrast, many women not only bore children but also worked, even joining trade unions, while (as always) some women could not or did not have children. Nor did the nineteenth century witness an alleged hegemonic bourgeois masculinity that eventually embraced the whole male population. Some middle-class men were entrepreneurial, individualistic, and religious, but by no means all of them. On the other hand, the “strong sense of social responsibility, purpose and commitment to hard work” so often thought characteristic of Victorian middle-class men was
also to be found among all classes—and in both sexes. This means it is surely right to question whether “gender trumped class as the basis of social identity.”
⁷¹
In truth, neither identity was all that pervasive, which means that
Engels’s late-life attempt to link and conflate the two, by arguing that under capitalism all men were dominant bourgeois while all women were exploited proletarians, was unsustainable—although this would not prevent
feminists such as
Germaine Greer from later embracing this view.
⁷²

These many significant qualifications to humanity’s essential division into the two distinct sexes cast serious doubt on the numerous accounts based on the assumption that this is how things have always been and still are.
⁷³
The supposedly all-pervasive polarity of male and female often turns out on closer inspection to be nothing of the kind, and men and women have generally gone through life in ways at least as much dividing each sex as unifying them, and in ways at least as much uniting the two sexes as setting them in opposition to each other. It is thus scarcely surprising that the billions of men and women spread around the globe have for the most part existed inert and lifeless in their
self-consciousness as males and females, embodying their sex and gender
biologically and culturally “in itself,” but not energizing and mobilizing it
“for itself.”
⁷⁴
As Simone de Beauvoir noted, women lacked “concrete means for organizing themselves into a unit which can stand face to face with the correlative unit” (by which she meant men), because they had no “solidarity of work and interest” that might have provided the sort of common and shared experience that would help them acquire a sense of shared identity.
⁷⁵
Only at “certain moments,” as
Joan Scott observes, “have ‘women’ become consolidated as an identity group.” “The identity of women,” she goes on, “was not so much a self-evident fact of history, as it was evidence—from particular and discrete moments in time—of someone’s, some group’s effort to identify and thereby mobilize a collectivity.”
⁷⁶

A further barrier to the successful mobilization of women as such has been what is termed the
“difference-versus-equality” dilemma.
⁷⁷
For if the initial presumption is of women’s essential
difference
from men, then what are their special needs, how should they be recognized, and how should they be met? But if the starting
premise is of women’s no less essential
sameness
as men, then how should they set about defining and achieving the equality that is their common right, and ought to be their shared possession, as morally equivalent human beings? Across the last century and a half, women’s
movements have oscillated uncertainly between what seem to be mutually exclusive approaches to their common
history and identity, to their mobilizing strategies, and to their collective ambitions.
⁷⁸
Meanwhile, other feminists have sought a way out of this dilemma by urging the need
both
to recognize the differences between men and women
and
to achieve equality between them, with the aim of realizing a new version of common humanity, which will include happier and more fulfilled women and might also include happier and more fulfilled men.
⁷⁹

The “difference-versus-equality” dilemma faced by feminists has also forced a choice between alternative strategies as to how to realize either of these ends. Should women, when organized and energized to self-awareness and self-consciousness, be reformist or revolutionary? Should they seek to achieve their goals by collaboration with men, or should they preserve their
gender solidarity and act entirely on their own? Are women willing to make gradual but incremental gains, with the help of men, or should they seek to usher in the feminist utopia by getting rid of
patriarchy in one single, heroic, self-reliant effort? Should they want a share in what men already do and have, or should they want the true liberation that can be achieved only by creating a new postgendered world? Should women want to make
capitalism work better, by getting more involved with it, or should they prefer to overthrow it in the name of a feminism that is committed to
socialism? Should they wish to join the male
bourgeoisie, or should they see themselves as a revolutionary female proletariat bent on eradicating it? Are the collaborationist writings of
Betty Friedan or the subversive polemics of
Germaine Greer the better inspiration?
⁸⁰
And one further question reveals the haziness of the feminist project even more forcibly: for how many women the world over, who do not belong to the well-educated and comfortably well-off Western middle
class, are any of these matters of immediate and practical relevance? Who could plausibly claim to speak for them, or for women as a whole?
⁸¹

Movements of women mobilized to improve the position of their sex and articulate its collective identity are scarcely 150 years old. To be sure, there are occasional episodes from earlier times when some women took public affairs into their own hands and organized with demands that were specific to their sex and
gender. In ancient
Greece, according to
Aristophanes’s play
Lysistrata
, they mobilized by denying their husbands and lovers sex in an effort to force them to stop fighting in the
Peloponnesian War; and in ancient Rome, according to
Livy and
Plutarch, the Sabine women tried to keep
Roman and Sabine men from killing each other. Women subsequently participated in riots across early modern Europe, but they were mainly about food, they took place in collaboration with men, and they were not specifically concerned with women’s issues or rights. Not until the
French Revolution, and in part inspired by such authors as
Olympe de Gouges, was there a visible flurry of
political activity by groups of women with a discernible feminist agenda, who sought to advance the claims of women, or a segment of them, to greater political participation. Yet they were also divided among themselves; they spoke the language of
equality but they mixed this with an awareness of
biological difference; and their movement did not last long, and in the short run it achieved nothing.
⁸²